Working together - and against eachother - in Dead of Winter Warring Colonies

Dead of Winter
| 2017-05-15

You’ve been perched in this tree for days now. You know their numbers, movements, guard rotations. Heck, you even know when they take bathroom breaks. Double heck, these guys actually have bathrooms! And blankets. And hot meals. And on Tuesday nights, you’re pretty sure they play foosball...

This Town’s Not Big Enough…

When preparing a game of Warring Colonies, one of seven unique main objectives is chosen. This main objective will apply to both colonies, setting up a competitive goal towards which all players will be working. The completion of the main objective by either colony triggers the end of the game. But of course, completion of the main objective still means nothing if your secret objective is neglected.

The Killing Blow main objective embraces the new combat system by requiring a colony to win 4 combats, one of which must be at the enemy colony. As seen last week, combats are risky. Generally it is good to weigh the risks before diving into a battle. But with this objective, caution must be thrown to the wind.

In the Divide and Conquer main objective, your team must be in control of the most non-colony locations by the end of round 4. The new bullet tokens are particularly important here. Not only can they add to your colony’s strength in the pivotal round 4 combats, but they can also be used to kick out enemy survivors from full locations during movement.

A common feature you will see in these main objectives is an alternate victory condition. If the enemy colony’s morale ever reaches 0, your colony will win! With colony combat and an assortment of unexpected new dangers, this happens more than you might think! Of course, you can always cut out the fluff and play with the bloody All Out War objective, where demoralizing the enemy colony is the only path to victory.

Coercive Cooperation

As always, crisis cards provide terrible challenges that must be faced each round. But now, both colonies must work together to prevent a crisis, or both colonies share in suffering the consequences.

At the beginning of each round a single crisis is revealed. Players from either team may contribute cards to the crisis on their turns. Cards are added to a shared crisis pile face-up, and players may only add cards that match the symbol. There is no way to “sabotage” the crisis directly. Instead, teams must negotiate who will (or won’t) contribute what. As most crises require a number of cards equal to the number of players, preventing a crisis usually involves a joint-colony effort.

The fail effect of a crisis will help to determine a colony’s willingness to contribute. Some crisis cards, like Flu, directly affect both colonies and cannot be ignored. Others, like Empathy, only affect the colony with higher morale and can be ignored by the losing colony. And still other crises have a more random fail effect, such as Location Fire, and are disregarded at a colony’s own risk.

The decision of who will or won’t help out on a crisis permeates every turn. There is always much to be done. Hopefully it is done by another player. Ideally, it is done by a player from the other colony. You need all that medicine for yourself, after all.

All in This Together

With competitive main objectives and shared crises, Warring Colonies offers new and varied challenges for your colony as goals, promises, and priorities regularly clash. Join us next week as we take a look at the newest survivors to brave the cold as well as the random item deck you can use to enhance any game of Dead of Winter.

Look for Dead of Winter: Warring Colonies this August!

Written by Timothy MeyerTimothy Meyer is the Dead of Winter Warring Colonies lead playtester and co-designer.